Summary

The General Social Surveys (GSS) were designed as part of a data diffusion project in 1972. The GSS replicated questionnaire items and wording in order to facilitate time-trend studies. The latest survey, GSS 2012, includes a cumulative file that merges all 29 General Social Surveys into a single file containing data from 1972 to 2012. The items appearing in the surveys are one of three types: Permanent questions that occur on each survey, rotating questions that appear on two out of every three surveys (1973, 1974, and 1976, or 1973, 1975, and 1976), and a few occasional questions such as split ballot experiments that occur in a single survey. The 2012 surveys included seven topic modules: Jewish identity, generosity, workplace violence, science, skin tone, and modules for experimental and miscellaneous questions. The International Social Survey Program (ISSP) module included in the 2012 survey was gender. The data also contain several variables describing the demographic characteristics of the respondents.

Unit(s) of Observation

Data Type(s)

Mode of Data Collection

Original Release Date

2013-09-11

Version Date

2013-09-11

Version History

2013-09-11 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: